Sunday, May 13, 2007

Mobile Barcodes And Patent Trolls

Phone Scoop has an interesting post about patent trolls, mobile barcodes and Physical World Connection.

"a company called neomedia would constantly give me a hard time whenever i wrote about mobile barcodes (especially in Asia) because they claimed to own all the patents on this idea and swore that they did it first.

Neomedia is still around, and still making these same claims. But neomedia never made anything, they bought the intellectual property from cuecat (remember them?) and then put up a web page with examples of how their technology would work. Supposedly Neomedia finally has a working barcode reader now, but of course so does every phone manufacturer outside the US."

It's interesting to hear views and opinions on companies associated with the Physical World Connection.This view seems to be more the standard than the exception.

5 comments:

The article discusses patent trolling and how Qualcomm is buying up patents.

There is a big difference in buying patents around your core business (protection), and just using patents for a business model.

One key point in the story "Qualcomm owns all the patents on CDMA, now granted their founders actually invented CDMA and have used it in actual products since the beginning. so they are not squatting on this patent"

Digital Convergence, the company who brought the :CueCat to market, licensed NeoMedia’s patents for $100 million back in 2000. $10 million was collected by NeoMedia before Digital Convergence went out of business.

http://neom.com/press_releases/2000/20001019.jsp

NeoMedia filed these patents back in the mid 90’s and Digital Convergence needed NeoMedia’s intellectual property for the :CueCat.